The Visual Image of Chemistry:
Perspectives from the History of Art and Science

Abstract: In this paper we
investigate the most important visual stereotypes of
chemistry as they occur in current portraits of chemists, depictions of
chemical plants, and images of chemical glassware and apparatus. By
studying the historical origin and development of these stereotypes
within the broader context of the history of art and science, and by
applying aesthetic and cultural theories, we explore what these images
implicitly communicate about the chemical profession to the public. We
conclude that chemists, along with commercial artists, have unknowingly
created a visual image of chemistry that frequently conveys negative
historical associations, ranging from imposture to kitsch. Other
elements of this image, however, aestheticize chemistry in a positive
manner by referring to classical ideals of beauty and borrowing from
revered motifs of modern art.

Keywords: public image of
chemistry, visual stereotypes, history of art, aesthetics, history of
science.

1. Introduction

When chemists complain about their bad public
image
they frequently forget that this image has been shaped over many
centuries, and that chemists themselves have played an active part in
its creation. PR managers know well that the public image of science is
created at the interface between science and the public and results
from the interaction between scientists and non-scientists. They also
appear to understand that visual images are extremely important for
carrying a message to the public, otherwise they would not produce such
a wealth of picture-laden glossy brochures. Like their clients from
chemistry or chemical industry, however, they are less versed in the
historically based cultural implications of the visual elements they
employ to portray chemistry, in part because scholarly studies on this
topic are virtually nonexistent. Although chemistry is routinely
portrayed by visual stereotypes, no effort has been made thus far to
understand what implicit sociocultural messages they convey. The use of
such images without knowledge of their historical contexts, no matter
how highly polished, can be embarrassing if, as we show, the
stereotypes carry with them negative associations.

In an earlier quantitative study we have
analyzed
the popular image of science and the visual self-representation of
scientists (Schummer & Spector 2007). Unlike other disciplines,
chemistry not only dominates the popular image of science overall, it
also stands out for its extremely conservative visual
self-representation. Chemists, rather than correcting the popular
clichés that they frequently complain about, reinforce these
clichés in
their own self-representation. In this paper we use the visual material
from our earlier study for a complementary qualitative analysis of the
most important visual stereotypes of chemistry as they occur in
portraits of chemists (Section 2), depictions of chemical plants
(Sections 3&4), and images of chemical glassware and apparatus
(Section 4). In order to explore their meaning and visual associations,
we delve deeply into our visual culture, which includes the history of
science, the history of art, and aesthetics. We investigate the
historical origins of these stereotypes, their predecessors, and the
cultural contexts in which they emerged and how they have changed over
time to assume their current meaning. A historical approach not only
has the advantage of tracking the development of these stereotypes, and
thus the dynamics of our visual culture, it also reveals their earlier
sociocultural associations and connotations which, even if they no
longer prevail, are still contained by the images. In addition,
examining these visual chemical stereotypes within the broader visual
culture allows us to interpret them in the context of past and present
aesthetic and cultural frameworks.

2. The Chemical Portrait: Its Origin and Meaning

Whenever today’s chemists want to be portrayed
in
such a way that anybody can recognize their professional identity, they
usually hold up in their hand a flask filled with some liquid that they
visually inspect.[1] This posture has become the
stereotypical visual icon of chemistry in self-portraits, professional
photographs, and clip-art cartoons (Figure 1a/b). Some chemists might
feel uncomfortable with this pose because it does not accurately embody
their daily professional work. They might wonder about the visual
conventions that forces them to assume this strange pose or about the
historical origin and implications. In this section we investigate the
historical origin and development of this motif. We argue that before
chemists assumed it as their professional icon, the motif, originally
representing uroscopy, was first an icon of medicine and then became a
symbol of quackery and imposture.

2.1 Uroscopy becomes an emblem of medicine

Along with pulse feeling,[2]
uroscopy (the examination of the patients’ urine) was the major means
of medical diagnosis in late ancient, medieval, and early modern
medicine. Color, smell, taste, and precipitate in fresh urine were
supposed to reveal to the learned physician the specific disease and
temperament of his patient. Briefly mentioned in the Hippocratic Corpus
and extensively dealt with by Galen, the doctrine of uroscopy later
became part of the medical core curricula of the newly established
Christian universities in Western Europe. This shift of uroscopy into
the core curricula of Christian universities was facilitated by the
translation of Islamic medical texts from Arabic into Latin and the
establishment of the school of Salerno, the first medical school in
Europe.

Before this time medicine had been considered
a
mechanical art or craft, such as carpentry and forging, and excluded
from Church school curricula, which had focused on the seven liberal
arts and the study of the Bible. Despite this, when medicine did become
part of the university curricula, it was quickly accepted as a highly
revered discipline. In this setting ‘academic physicians’ had to
distinguish themselves from ‘lay’ medical practitioners, who continued
to provide major medical care for people well into the 18th
century. In particular, they distinguished themselves through their
knowledge of the nature and causes of diseases and health – hence the
English term ‘physicke’ for medicine up to the 18th century.
This knowledge was largely based on Galen’s theory of humors, from
which the diagnostic capacities of urine as an indicator of humoral
imbalance derived. Thus, when it came to the academic physicians
choosing an emblematic representation for their field – each of the
seven liberal arts had a long established emblem or visual symbol
(Lindgren 1992) – they chose the symbol of uroscopy: a man holding up
and examining a glass flask filled with urine, a so-called ‘matula’.

Although we still know little about medieval
visual
culture, there is some evidence for the early development and use of
this emblem. Since late antiquity, outside of the Islamic world,
illustrations were frequently used in medical texts for entertainment
rather than for demonstration (Grape-Albers 1977, Zotter 1980).
Typically, written medical recipes and treatments were illustrated by a
physician handing over a vessel of medicine to his patient. Because
that image strongly resembles the later depictions of uroscopy, where a
patient hands over a matula to the physician, it is very likely that
this motif is the iconographical origin of the symbol of uroscopy.
Moreover, there was a well-developed medieval Christian art of
decorating the Bible with colorful miniatures of Bible stories in the
margin or within the enlarged first letters of each chapter. That art
was also applied to the earliest Latin translations of Arabic and Greek
medical texts such as Avicenna’s Canon medicinae, the Articella
(a digest of Galen), and what was known as the Aphorisms of
Hippocrates. In all of these early Latin manuscript translations we
find miniatures representing the practice of uroscopy in prominent
places (see Figures 2a and b).[3]

Figure 2 shows three depictions of uroscopy
from
the 13th and 14th centuries that later, with some
modifications, became common motifs: the study of uroscopy with matula
and book, the teaching of uroscopy to a pupil, and the medical practice
of uroscopy, with patients lining up with their boxed matulae in front
of a physician. However, in the first two manuscript based images the
physician holds the bottom of the matula, which is still reminiscent of
the late antique motif of the medicine vessel described above. Only the
third one (Figure 2c) presents the posture that later became
stereotypical for medicine and much later for chemistry: the flask held
at the neck and raised high in front of the eyes. Unlike the two
medical manuscript illustrations (Figures 2a and b) this relief, which
was publicly placed among Giotto’s/Pisano’s famous emblematic
representations of the liberal arts at the Campanile of the Cathedral
of Florence, was clearly intended to be a popular emblematic
representation of medicine.[4]

Prior to the establishment of European
universities
a debate had begun about the order of knowledge and thus about the
ranking and order of the arts and crafts. This debate continued for
centuries and employed emblematic depictions of the various
disciplines, which are another useful source for medieval visual
studies. In these illustrations medicine was routinely portrayed
through uroscopy (Figures 3a and b). By the late 14th
century uroscopy was a fully established public emblem of medicine
throughout Europe. The image was probably even used as a trademark of
medicine and put on signboards at the doors of practicing physicians.[5] By the early 15th century this symbol was
so highly venerated that the twin saints Cosmas and Damian, who had
become the Christian patrons of medicine due to a ‘miraculous’ surgery
in the 3rd or 4th century, were often portrayed
in the pose of urine inspection in churches and other religious
contexts (Figure 3c).[6]

2.2 Uroscopy becomes a symbol of quackery and fraud

Medicine has never been without its critics. A
widespread early Christian critique involved an argument based on how
useless and powerless medicine was compared to the Almighty. In late
medieval caricatures, which widely used animals to mock their subjects,
the ‘physician as ape’ or the ‘ape as physician’ became a popular motif
(Janson 1952) (Figure 4a). In the late 15th century, along
with the devastating pests in Europe, the skeleton (a symbol of death)
began to replace the ape in popularity, resulting in images that
portrayed powerless urine inspecting doctors confronted with naked
death. A typical example is Holbein’s Dance of the Death
(Figure 4b).[7]

Apart from the religious criticisms of
medicine,
more specific critiques of medical practice with a particular focus on
uroscopy grew during the 16th century. People began to mock
the increasingly fantastic claims about the diagnostic potential of
uroscopy, which by this time had expanded to include Paracelsian
methods of urine distillation and quasi-chemical tests. In particular,
the notion that the urine-filled matula would somehow map the body of
the patient and thus allow localizing diseases, which culminated in
Leonhardt Thurneisser’s urine distillation apparatus in the shape of a
man (Figure 4c), became subject to satire. For instance, Pieter
Brueghel the Elder produced a satirical drawing of a doctor and his dog
discovering a fanciful humunculus in a matula (Figure 4d). Despite
these criticisms the business of uroscopy flourished during this time
period and its practitioners were quite well-paid, which further
encouraged satirists like Thomas Murner to attack both physicians for
their greed and uselessness and uroscopy patients for their foolishness
(Figure 4e).

Because vernacular textbooks on uroscopy
began to
be printed in large numbers in the 16th century, the art of
urine inspection and ‘pisse prophecy’ (uromancy) became extremely
popular among patients, inducing a rapid growth of self-educated
uroscopists. As a result the medical establishment was challenged to
defend their academic prestige by clearly distinguishing themselves
from these practitioners. By 1601 the statutes of the College of
Physicians of London declared, "It is ridiculous and stupid to attempt
to interpret anything definite and certain merely from inspection of
the urine and by inference there from, whether about the type and
nature of the illness, or the state and condition of the sufferer," to
which was later added "for that reason we desire and decree that
neither any Collegiate nor any candidate should, like the sly imposter,
use mere inspection of the urine in his consultation" (Connor 2001).
Physicians all over Europe published pamphlets and books, such as
Thomas Brian’s Pisse-Prophet (London, 1637) and Johan Van
Dueren’s De Ontdekking der Bedriegeryen Vande gemeene Pis-Besienders
(Amsterdam, 1688) (see Figure 4f) to denounce the quackery and fraud of
uroscopy practitioners. Of course, physicians continued to practice
urine inspection, but, as they were quick to point out, their analysis
was based on the knowledge of causes (‘physicke’) while their
competitors relied on the unlearned practice of ‘empirical medicine’.
By the 17th century the medical establishment had
deliberately destroyed the medieval emblem of medicine. Uroscopy was no
longer a symbol of learned medicine. The image of a man gazing at a
flask in his hand was now a symbol of quackery, imposture, and fraud,
and medicine was left without a professional icon. To fill the gap, the
medical establishment of that time rediscovered the ancient Greco-Roman
symbol of medicine, the Rod of Asclepius, which had been virtually
absent in the previous Christian era, and claimed it as their new
symbol (Figure 4g).[8]

Neither uroscopy nor the general image of a
man
gazing at a flask in his hand was part of the otherwise rich iconology
of alchemical text illustrations. However, in the works of the Flemish
and Dutch genre painters this motif became closely associated with
alchemy. Indeed, many of the artists cited above also produced
paintings of alchemists. The association of the uroscopy icon with
alchemy was fostered for several reasons. First, alchemists or chymists
had long used glass flasks that were similar in shape to the classical
matula. Second, Paracelsian iatrochemistry had given a boost to
uroscopy through the distillation and quasi-chemical analysis of urine.
Third, both classical alchemists and Paracelsian iatrochemists, like
uroscopists, were the subject of numerous satires and biting pamphlets
accusing them of imposture and fraud.

A selection of paintings from David Teniers
the
Younger illustrates how uroscopy and alchemy became visually melded. In
many of his alchemist paintings Teniers employed one of the two
classical satirical motifs in the foreground: the reading alchemist
(Figure 5a) or the puffer alchemist (Figure 5c). To show that the first
motif is not a symbol of esteemed scholarship, it is useful to compare
it with the Italian painting Jesus and the doctors of the Faith
(Figure 5b) which Teniers took as the model for his reading alchemist.[10] During the Renaissance the image of the
twelve-year old Jesus among the doctors (from Luke, 2, 41ff.)
was commonly used to demonstrate the inferiority of human scholarship
compared to divine inspiration. In this painting (Figure 5b) the artist
accentuated the expression of the inferiority of human endeavors by
giving the figure in the foreground a particularly stubborn and
book-wormish demeanor, which Teniers meticulously copied in his reading
alchemist (Figure 5a). Teniers’ puffer alchemist (Figure 5c) is a
variation of an older motif, the Antichrist/Satan who teaches
gold-making to the people, illustrations of which became popular in 15th-century
Germany (Figure 5g). Both Hans Weiditz (Figure 5f) and Albrecht
Dürer
(Figure 5e) employed that motif in their woodcut illustrations of the
written satires of alchemy by Petrarch and Sebastian Brant,
respectively, who had made alchemy the epitome of forgery, fraud,
greed, and moral corruption (Schummer 2006). Pieter Brueghel the Elder
further developed this motif into a pictorial drama with an obsessed
alchemist ruining his family (Figure 5d).

Teniers and his colleagues employed these two
classical alchemy motifs but combined them with the classical
uroscopy/imposture motif. Note that Figures 5a and 5c each show an
alchemist in the foreground and a group of men in the background with
one holding a flask in his hand like a uroscopist. In the next
‘alchemist’ image (Figures 5h), the composition of Figure 5c is almost
inverted: the ‘puffer’ has moved to the background, while the reading
alchemist now holds a flask in his hand. The pose of the alchemist in
Figure 5h is virtually identical to the classical pose of the urine
inspecting quack doctor in Figure 5i. Thus, quack doctors and
alchemists became exchangeable and merged towards one and the same
motif in the works of Teniers and his colleagues.

2.4 Satire continues

Flemish and Dutch genre paintings of quack
doctors/alchemists were extremely popular throughout Europe well into
the 19th century. Many of them were reproduced in etchings
and widely disseminated during the 18th and early 19th
centuries. In addition, painters from other countries employed or
copied the motifs, such as Trophîme Bigot (1579-1650) in France,
Pietro
Longhi (1702-1785) in Italy, Franz Christoph Janneck (1707-1761) in
Austria, James Northcote (1746-1831) in England, Carl Spitzweg
(1802-1885) in Germany, William Fettes Douglas (1822-1891) in Scotland,
and Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) in the USA, but only few artists
made original modifications (e.g. Figures 6a/b).

Once established as a symbol of
quackery and
fraud
this motif was used for all kinds of satire. For example, Figure 7a
shows a political satire by Temple West (c. 1739-1783) mocking King
George III’s misjudgment of Napoleon by depicting ‘the little emperor’
as a small figure in a large glass retort. Throughout the 19th
century, images based on this motif frequently included such
nationalistic overtones, but the primary satirical attacks continued to
be aimed at medicine (Figures 7b/c).

2.5 Portraits of 19th-century chemists and their 20th-century
transformation

In general the image of a man holding up and
gazing
at a flask – the archetypical pose of 20th-century chemists
– was carefully avoided by 19th-century chemists. Nobody
wanted to be portrayed as an imposter or swindler. Based on our
analysis of hundreds of painted and photographed portraits in various
collections, 19th-century chemists preferred four types of
portraits:[11] (1) Most chemists, particularly in
the German and English traditions, are depicted sitting on a chair with
some glassware or chemical apparatus in the background and books or
notes in the foreground (Figure 8a). (2) In some portraits the only
accessories are books, indicating the scientist’s strong theoretical
orientation (Figure 8b). (3) A third group of particularly English
chemists are presented with their inventions, which suggests their
ambition for technological applications of chemistry (Figure 8c). (4)
Finally, a fourth group, consisting particularly of French chemists,
are depicted working in the laboratory, and it is only here that some
slight association with the quack/imposture motif sometimes appears
(Figure 8d).

How then did this pose become so popular
among 20th-century
chemists? We suspect that commercial artists and photographers, whether
consciously or not, gradually manoeuvred chemists into that pose and
that chemists were increasingly uninformed about its negative
symbolism. Eventually, without a clear understanding of its cultural
and historical implications, they unwittingly embraced as the icon of
their professional identity a symbol of imposture and fraud that had
been firmly established for centuries.

To support our thesis we analyze three series
of
portraits of eminent 19th-century chemists in which the
classical uroscopy/imposture motif gradually moves from satirical
caricature to serious portraiture. Figure 9a shows John Dalton
(1766-1844) in typical portrait type 1, i.e. with some chemical
apparatus in the background and books or notes (here, his atomic
formulae) in the foreground. This painting by Joseph Allen (1770-1839)
was definitely made during Dalton’s life and certainly with his
agreement. In contrast, Figure 9b shows a later caricature (probably
from 1882) by James Stephenson (1808-1886) of Dalton as President of
the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, which illustrates
that the uroscopy/imposter motif was deliberately applied to chemists
in 19th-century satire. Although the vessel he gazes at is
somewhat unusual, it is clearly a version of the uroscopy/imposter
motif. Because Dalton was famously color blind – he published the first
account on what in England is still called Daltonism (Dalton 1798) –
and because classical urine inspection was focused on color, we may
assume an additional irony in the caricature. Moreover, Dalton gazes at
the vessel as if he was reading a book, which one would expect from the
president of a literary society. Thus, the caricaturist employed the
uroscopy/imposter motif and adjusted it with subtlety to the case of
Dalton: The president of the literary society cannot read books and
instead prefers reading liquids (urine), but he is even unable to do
that because of his color blindness. While the satirical content of
this image was certainly clear for contemporaries of Stephenson, later
viewers might have misunderstood it as a caricature of a scientists
engaging in overly pedantic empirical work in chemistry; if only he
would lower the vessel a bit and look more relaxed, he might be viewed
as the perfect experimental chemist.

a

b

Figure 9. (a)
Portrait of John Dalton; engraving by William Henry Worthington after a
1814 painting by Joseph Allen. (b) Caricature of Dalton by James
Stephenson (1808-1886), probably from 1882 (both Edgar Fahs Smith
Collection).

Our second example is a series of portraits
of
Marcelin Berthelot (1827-1907) in which, unlike in the case of Dalton,
the uroscopy/imposture pose already appears in what seems to be a
serious painting, before it was actually transformed into a proper
satirical caricature. Figure 10a is a well-known photograph of
Berthelot at work in a laboratory from the late 19th
century. He is looking down at his work-bench where in his left hand he
holds a test tube as if he is preparing to run a reaction. Figure 10b
is an oil painting of Berthelot by Harry Herman Salomon (1860-1936)
based on a photograph taken in the late 19th or early 20th
century and perhaps painted after Bertholet’s death. If you compare
both images (the setting, equipment, and dress), it is obvious that the
painting was made either directly after the photograph in Figure 10a or
from a photograph taken on the same occasion. Thus, Salomon either
modified the pose of the photograph or chose another one from the set
to present Berthelot in a pose that almost exactly matches the
classical uroscopy motif, except that the flask is replaced with a test
tube. Since the painting otherwise fits the classical genre of
portraiture, we may assume that the reference to the uroscopy motif was
meant only as a mild satirical allusion. One might suspect that at the
turn of the century many viewers no longer understood the allusion and
its symbolic meaning. However, even if the symbolic knowledge was
beginning to fade, it was still present, as a further transformation of
Berthelot’s portrait illustrates. To leave no doubt of the connection
to uroscopy, a later unknown caricaturist lifted Berthelot’ arm a bit
higher and replaced the test tube with a urinal, now the modern version
that is still used in hospitals today (Figure 10c).

The famous 1885 painting of Louis Pasteur
(1822-1895) by Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905) is probably the first
authorized portrait of a 19th-century chemist that
appropriates the classical uroscopy/imposter motif without being a
satire or bearing deliberate satirical allusions (Figure 11a). Given
Pasteur’s fame, particularly in the early 20th century, and
the significance of the painting, it is likely that this image
considerably contributed to making this pose the icon of the chemical
profession. Nevertheless? There are still differences between it and
the classical motif which a superficial viewer of the portrait might
ignore. Pasteur holds a bottle rather than a flask, the bottle is
filled with a solid instead of a liquid, and he looks down at the
bottle in his right hand and a paper note in his left hand as if he
were comparing them. In Robert Thom’s portrait of Pasteur from the
mid-20th century (Figure 11b), these differences are
corrected: Pasteur gazes at the liquid-filled flask at eye level. In
addition, since Thom painted this portrait as part of his extensive
series of paintings of "historical moments in science and pharmacy"
(Metzl & Howell 2004), he was certainly aware of the historical
iconology and symbolism of his image. The image was intended to capture
Pasteur’s experiments disproving the spontaneous generation of life.
Anyone familiar with the history of these experiments would know that
it is not the flasks but the connection between the flasks that was
crucial to Pasteur’s experiments. The connection is visible in Thom’s
painting, but the emphasis is clearly on the flask, so as to repeat
with slight modification the classical uroscopy/imposter motif. A clear
reiteration of the motif appears in the bronze statue of Pasteur in
Figure 11c, which is probably from the early 20th century
when many such statues were created to commemorate Pasteur’s fame. It
is unfortunate that, although today’s chemists might consider this
statue a tribute to Pasteur’s greatness as a scientist, it is actually
fraught with unsavory historical allusions.

Misunderstandings of cultural symbolism can
be
particularly problematic if one deliberately strives to create a
professional identity. A chemist with such an ambition was Charles F.
Chandler (1836-1925). He was co-founder of the American Chemical
Society, and its president in 1881 and 1889, and co-founder of the Journal
of the American Chemical Society and its predecessor, the American
Chemist (1870-7), which he co-edited with his brother. He was also
"an organizer and first president (1898-1900) of The Chemist’s Club, a
club whose goal was to foster a social and professional identity in the
chemical community" (Bowden 1997, p. 155). It must have been during
these years that the photograph shown in Figure 12 was taken: Chandler
in front of his porch under a tree with suit, tie, and hat, holding a
flat-bottom flask in his right hand. Although it is a variation of the
classical uroscopy/imposter motif (e.g. Figure 4b), its strong
resemblance to the classical image suggests that he had seen such
images before but was probably unaware of its negative historical
legacy. By all indications this is an amateur photograph, so we can
assume that artists or professional photographers did not influence his
choice of pose. Rather like a self-portrait, it shows how Chandler
himself – and thousands of chemists since then – chose to portray the
visual identity of their profession.

The pose of a man holding up and gazing at a
flask
has changed in meaning over the past nine centuries. Originally it was
a professional icon of the newly established academic medicine, which
combined empirical diagnostics with causal knowledge. As the validity
of the diagnostic tool was debunked, it came to represent ‘merely
empirical medicine’ without deeper knowledge and ultimately became a
symbol of quackery and imposture, first in medicine and alchemy and
then as a general satirical motif for close to four centuries. When
chemists, assisted by commercial artists, made this motif their
professional icon at the turn to the 20th century, its
satirical associations were still alive. Since this pose now represents
chemistry, and more generally experimental laboratory science, it might
be easy to conclude that its debased associations have disappeared.
However, we would argue that such a ready dismissal would be
inappropriate. As with all powerful iconic imagery that possess a long,
and predominately distasteful, historical lineage, the negative
implications of that image can never be completely suppressed in the
public consciousness. Even if present day viewers of such images are no
longer overtly aware of their negative cultural connotations, the
choice of early 20th-century chemists and artists to make
this pose the visual icon of chemistry has indirectly
influenced the public perception of the chemical profession.
Ultimately, that choice confirmed and reinforced the negative attitudes
of those who were already critical of chemistry before, and it is this
historical legacy that lives on in the non-visual public images of
chemistry today.

3. Chemical Plants: The Panoramic View

Like the stereotypical chemical portrait that
emerged out of a long history of science portraiture, depictions of
chemical plants developed from the broader history of industrial
landscape paintings and drawings. In this section we analyze typical
early 21st-century photographs of chemical plants against
this art historical background. We argue that the stereotypical
features of these photographs break with the important art historical
traditions most often used to depict industry and instead rely on art
historical traditions that were not typically used to depict industrial
scenes. In doing so, we suggest that today’s photographs of chemical
plants employ a visual strategy that sanitizes the negative cultural
associations of chemistry while simultaneously embracing a demeaning
kitsch aesthetic.

3.1 Industrial landscape: historical traditions

Since the 18th-century period of
industrialization, artists’ renderings of industry began to express a
conflicted reaction to industry in the larger culture, a response that
is at once celebratory and admiring and a site of distain and distrust.[12] During the British romantic period these responses
were expressed through renderings of the industry within the tradition
of the picturesque or sublime landscape painting. A prototypically
sublime rendition of industry is famously captured in Philippe Jacques
de Loutherbourg’s 1801 painting Coalbrookdale by Night (Figure
13a). Coalbrookdale, the center of early English iron works and
therefore an engine of English prosperity during this time period, was
itself a conflicted site where the quintessential English countryside
was, as expressed by the renowned agriculturist Arthur Young, "too
beautiful to be much in union with the variety of horrors spread at the
bottom; the noises of forges, mill etc., with their vast
machinery, the flames bursting from the furnaces with the burning of
coal and the smoke of the lime kilns" (Briggs 1979, p.13). This
painting and an aquatint of Coalbrookdale from 1805 by William Pickett
for Loutherbourg’s book on The Romantic and Picturesque Scenery of
England and Wales (Figure 13b)[13] together
encapsulate the complexities of the attitude toward industry in England
at that time. While Loutherbourg’s painting stands as an emblem of the
fear and mystery articulated by the Burkian sublime (see Section 3.3),
the later aquatint transforms Coalbrookdale into a relatively benign
picturesque landscape for English tourists. Later in the 19th
century artists in various traditions, including the impressionists,
sometimes placed industrial sites harmoniously into natural landscapes
or towns.[14] In early 20th century North
America, images of the industrial landscape were usurped by powerful
industrialists such as Herbert Dow (Frese 2000) and Henry Ford (Troyan
& Hirshler 1987, pp. 17-21), who commissioned artists to celebrate
their economic prowess and enhance their public relations. Naturally
these paintings provided a positive, and suitably unthreatening, image
of the industries they depicted. For these, unlike earlier images of
industry such as Coalbrookdale at Night, therefore, we can
unambiguously read the smoke coming out of the chimneys as a symbol of
economic productivity and wealth rather than as a noxious indicator of
industrial pollution (Figure 14).

A varied representation of industry can also
be
found in images of workers in industrial settings (Figure 15). In many
paintings of this genre the workers are rendered as heroic and
hard-working and it is the representation of their surroundings that
expresses the artists’ attitude toward industry itself. A typical early
example is Joseph Wright’s An Iron Forge (Figure 15a). Using
his trademark chiaroscuro technique, this middle-class artist painted
the iron workers in a picturesque setting being observed by affluent
tourists and their curious children apparently seeking, in one critic’s
words, a "thoughtful balance […] between sense and sensibility, between
the prosaic, necessary task efficiently performed which is going to
benefit mankind, and the fear or amazement that its accomplishment
inspires" (Nicoldon 1968, p. 50). It also, however, reveals the darker
side of the picturesque in which the working classes were aestheticized
for the consumption of the affluent. In 19th-century realist
paintings, such as Adolf von Menzel’s Iron Rolling Mill, this
idealized view of industrial work is superseded by interiors of
industrial plants that are overcrowded with workers, replete with
machinery, and overheated by steam and fire (Figure 15b). In the early
20th century depictions of industrial workers became more
overtly politicized emblems of the socialist (and national-socialist)
movements in many countries. As seen in the soviet era propaganda
poster Let’s consolidate the victory of socialism in the USSR!
(Figure 16) such images accorded the workers with even more blatant
heroic status than those of the 18th and 19th
centuries.

3.2 Chemical plants as architectural photographs

In current photographs of chemical industry,[15] the classical art historical motifs of industry,
such as plants harmoniously embedded in natural landscapes, smoking
chimneys as a symbol for prosperity, and heroic workers are virtually
absent. Instead, the typical modern image, like those shown in Figure
17, is remarkably reiterative and self-reflexive. The most important
pictorial elements of chemical plant photographs are smokestacks,
towers, storage tanks, piping, and conduits, with towers or smokestacks
typically growing (by perspectival correction) straight out of the bulk
of the plant into the sky, taking up two thirds or more of the image
(Figure 17a-b). Most of the images employ special lighting effects:
industrial plants are imaged shortly before or after sunset to ensure
vibrant skies that recall the colorful pictorial liquids filling
glassware in most stereotypical representations of the laboratory
equipment (see below), while some photos, taken at night, foreground
buildings with spectacular interior illumination (Figures 17c-d).

In addition, modern images of chemical plants
are
typically static rather than dynamic. They are most often portrayed
without smoke coming out of their smokestacks and without people
working near or with the equipment. These images, in addition to the
curious fact that the plants appear to be neither in operation nor in
ruin or decay (in fact, are in pristine condition), disconnects them
from the picturesque industrial landscapes of the 18th and 19th
centuries. Furthermore, in the absence of people, modern photographers
of chemical industry belie their debt to more overtly propagandistic
images of industrial workers and industrial sites, e.g. in
Soviet social realism and American WPA murals, and to their historical
progenitors in the artistic tradition of genre paintings. Finally, the
fact that the photographs are situated away from towns or cities and
have no smoke emerging from their smokestacks divorces them from a
variety of conflicting pictorial traditions: the meliorative nature of
‘man’s’ interaction with nature, the contrasting blight of
industrialization in the landscape, and the economic prowess of a
particular nation. By choosing to photograph them as static structures
free of humanity in a background featureless except for the atmospheric
essence of the sky, photographers of chemical plants would seem, in
fact, to forcefully sever their connection to earlier artistic
traditions. Indeed, the very contextlessness of the chemical plants
shifts them from early 20th century industrial images that
reflected nationalist pride to the post-nationalist identity of the
globalized corporation.

To what do these images owe their historical
debts
if not the industrial landscapes of art history? Because of their focus
on smokestacks, tanks, and other equipment essential to
industrial-scale chemistry, and because of their lack of context, one
might be tempted to interpret them as representationally realistic and
therefore to fit, perhaps, within the tradition exemplified by Bernd
and Hilla Becher’s bleak industrial landscape photographs taken from
1959 forward (Becher & Becher 2002). It might also be easy to
dismiss these repetitive photographs as simply the products of
commercial photographers commissioned by chemical industry, and thus
being of little visual interest. Some would say that they simply become
boring; yet others would point out that these are precisely the
qualities that make them interesting: their stance of
disinterestedness, their visual isolation, their juxtaposition of an
industrial, unnatural subject against an atmospheric sky, and the very
fact that they are reiterative. Indeed, in this latter reading, if
instead of being produced in a commercial context, the photographs had
been created as ‘high’ art, a critic might comment that they fit within
the construct of ironic banality explored by many of today’s most
influential visual artists.

Furthermore, when we focus less on the
subject
materials of the photographs and more on their composition, especially
the use of perspective and atmospheric effects, we find that the formal
aspects of these images borrow from various traditions. First, the
isolation of the plants, which contrasts so markedly with most early
representations of industry, impresses upon the viewer their lack of
context. Framed by the edge of the photographs, chemical plants are
portrayed without reference to the land or people that their presence
might affect, either positively or negatively. This cropped frame
removes them from all external reference points allowing the photograph
to symbolically eliminate the chemical plants potential for
contamination. The static, unpeopled content of the photographs, in
collusion with the reiterative character of the images, thus
simultaneously produces and reinforces a sense of containment and
safety. Important to this effect is the photographic perspective, which
aligns the plants with early architectural photographs of castles and
cathedrals that contain similar formal features such as towers and
conical elements (Figure 18) (Robinson & Herschman 1987, pp. 2-55).
Like those images, these are often frontal shots from ground level
viewpoints, which emphasize the vastness of the structure. Although
less frequently, some chemical landscape photographs are shot from an
elevated position, a perspective also common in early architectural
photographs of cathedrals and castles. Ironically, like the genre of
landscape painting itself, which marked an artistic shift from Classic
to Romantic and Christian to secular (Mitchell 2002, p. 13), images of
chemical plants transpose the art historical perspective used primarily
to image cathedrals (Christian) and castles (classical) into the
ultimate site of secularization – industry. By a unique legerdemain,
however, the simple fact that these photographs participate in this
tradition has the simultaneous effect of hallowing the industrial site
and placing it under the symbolic aegis that cathedrals and castles
historically sustained. In effect, these photographs invite a symbolic
exchange in which the industrial site can stand in for the signs of
governance and social order historically signified by castle and church.

3.3 Chemical plants as sublime landscape

Even with these traditions in mind, however,
photographs of the chemical landscape may not initially impress the
viewer with an experiential sensibility beyond that associated with the
magnitude of the plant. From an art historically informed perspective,
however, it is clear that the composition of such photographs
introduces an emotive element which links their lineage to the sublime
landscape images of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Borrowing from the atmospheric effects of J.M.W. Turner and the
grandiosity of Casper David Friedrich (Figure 19), they are expansive
in scope, employ the sky as "the key note, the standard of scale, and
the chief organ of sentiment" (Constable 1998, pp. 50f.), and operate
on a vertical rather than horizontal axis. In addition to displaying
the proportional conventions of sublime landscape painting, the use of
special lighting effects in chemical landscapes has a clear allegiance
to the atmospheric effects found in Romantic era industrial landscape
paintings. As epitomized by Loutherbourg’s Coalbrookdale by Night
(Figure 13a), this subgenre of paintings represents some of the most
dramatic atmospheric effects from the sublime landscape tradition.

Previous studies of landscape have shown that
artists’ representations of ‘natural’ landscapes are not naïve,
realistic representations of nature, but are undergirded with cultural
narratives (e.g. Mitchell 2002). Thus, for many art historians
and literary critics even the most ‘natural’ landscape paintings and
photographs express social hierarchies, labor relations, and
imperialism in such a way that they effectively contain class conflict,
labor unrest, and concerns about national identity – in the same way
that modern chemical landscape photography contains fears concerning
labor practices, industrial safety, and environmental contamination.
Within the paradigm of landscape painting, nature itself is a human
construct laden with conventions that make it comprehensible as
‘landscape’, and artistic representations of the landscape overtly
articulate these conventions. Similar conventions are smuggled into the
decidedly unnatural vistas of the chemical landscape.

By acknowledging the constructed nature of
landscape and the articulation of its visual conventions in landscape
painting, we can understand visual representations of the industrial
landscape as an extension of traditional landscape painting. The
landscape conventions of the picturesque and sublime, which are readily
visible in 19th century paintings of industry (Figure 13),
are cloaked in the images of chemical plants with which we are
concerned. When we consider contemporary images of chemical industry
within the larger landscape tradition, rather than simply as
photographs of chemical plants, we secure the connection of these
images to sublime landscape painting. As noted by Snyder (2002), 19th-century
commercial landscape photographers "did not escape landscape
conventions; they adopted and reformulated them". Thus, like Carleton
Watkins who took industrial photographs for the California State
Geological Society in the 19th century, early 21st
century photographers of chemical plants have adopted and reformulated
a formal and philosophical link to the sublime tradition. Formally,
their photographs are composed along the same physical scale, with the
same vertical forms, and with the same attention to atmospheric
effects; philosophically, they are framed by Edmund Burke’s and
Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theories of the sublime.

In his Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origins
of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, pt. II), Burke
distinguished beauty as a form of pleasure, from the sensation of the
sublime, which is caused by imagined threats to our existence that, if
compared to real threats, are accompanied by delightful relief. For
instance, an image of the devastating power and grandeur of nature can
cause us to experience the emotion of the sublime if we are
simultaneously aware that the threat is only imagined. In the chemical
landscape this view of nature is transmogrified into an industrial site
and the trigger for the sublime experience is reconstituted as a fear
of chemicals and the power of the chemical industry.[16]
In Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790, §§ 23-9), the
delight of
the sublime results from a self-reflection of the human mind, which
further helps us to understand today’s photographs of chemical plants.
From this perspective when nature through her grandeur and power
intimidates our sense of self as physical beings and makes us look and
feel small and powerless, we can resort to the capacities of human
reason that is ultimately powerful. Thus, according to Kant, the
original fear and intimidation produced by nature is turned into the
delight of the sublime once we recognize our capacity to comprehend and
ultimately control its seemingly overwhelming might. By a clever
displacement, when industry, such as the Coalbrookdale industrial site,
is placed into natural landscape or replaces nature all together, as in
today’s chemical landscapes, the Kantian sublime assumes a new
dimension: industry becomes the object by means of which the human mind
can recognize its own greatness.

3.4 Chemical plants as kitsch

Kitsch has been a topic of debate among
art/cultural
critics and scholars for more than a century (Kulka 1996, pp. 13-22).
The most influential critics on the subject include Clement Greenberg
(1909-1994) and Hermann Broch (1886-1951). Greenberg (1939) defined
kitsch as "popular, commercial art and literature" (as opposed to
avant-garde art and literature) that "is a product of the industrial
revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America"
and "is mechanical and operates by formulas [… and] vicarious
experience and faked sensations". Similarly, Broch (1969) considered
kitsch a "system of imitation" that corrupts real art (in his case the
art of Romanticism) serving as an "element of evil in the value system
of art" (Broch 1969). More recently scholars have attempted to
recuperate kitsch from these harsh critiques by reframing it as a
distinct aesthetic without regard to class-based tastes. These include
Robert C. Solomon’s (1991) defense of sentimentality in art, Sam
Binkley’s (2000) argument "for a uniquely kitsch aesthetic that employs
the thematics of repetition, imitation and emulation as a distinct
aesthetic style" and Kulka (1996, pp. 1-12) who conservatively attempts
to reduce kitsch to an aesthetic category (like the grotesque or the
beautiful) that is objectively deficient as an art form rather than
subjectively a matter of taste. In sum, despite the complexities and
inconsistencies between the arguments articulated by these critics and
others, kitsch can be understood as a sociocultural phenomenon
(normally connected to the development of the middle-class in the 19th
century) and a debased artistic sensibility with roots in
the
Romantic era.

Broch made clear how the aesthetic ideals of
Romanticism became the progenitor of what we now know of as kitsch:
although not kitsch, Romantic art is "the mother of kitsch and that
there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one
cannot distinguish between them" (Broch 1969, p. 62). From this
perspective Romantic era paintings like Friedrich’s Wanderer Above
the Sea of Fog (1818), Schinkel’s Medieval City on a River (1815)
and even Loutherbourg’s Coalbrookdale by Night (Figure 13a)
cross into the realm of kitsch because they contain "a range of
references to high or legitimate culture" (Ross 1989, p. 145), but in
doing so rely on the use of formal clichés and an overwrought
sentimentality that undermines their artistic intentions. This slippage
between Romanticism, and in particular the Romantic sublime, and kitsch
is also found in modern chemical landscapes. The expressive note of
these images manifests itself in the expanse of richly atmospheric sky
juxtaposed against the chemical plant. That the sky is the intended
site of emotionality in these images is made clear when viewed in
contrast to the typical images of academic chemistry buildings, which
do not include such skies and thus strike one as mundane and visually
uninteresting. The sky in photographs of chemical plants, on the other
hand, adds an element of over-sentimentality to the image that
potentially links it to a disingenuously emotive stance and threatens
to topple the images from sublimity into kitsch. Viewed in this way,
these ornate skies imitate those found in sublime landscape paintings
and the images themselves are therefore merely draped in the most overt
trapping of this tradition. Through this lens, these images like the
classic visual clichés of kitsch (e.g., exaggeratedly
round eyed
children and puppy dogs (Solomon 1991) provide a falsely benign image
of the world – where chemical plants are only associated with the
production of goods that yield ‘better living through chemistry’ and
never with the realities of chemical pollution and toxicity.

Kitsch developed as a consequence of the
mechanization of mass-production along with the simultaneous growth of
the middle-class in the 19th century (Kulka 1996, pp.
13-22). The ability to cheaply reproduce art (as posters, postcards, etc.)
gave the middle-class access to a simulacrum of images that were
previously available only to the privileged. Cheap reproduction yielded
a new aesthetic based on the imitative rather than the authentic. (In
an ironic twist to this history, kitsch has since been hijacked by the
elites of the world of art). Chemical landscapes are therefore doubly
endowed with the mechanized qualities of kitsch. They imitate the art
of the sublime tradition and they have a reiterative impulse – so that
each image mirrors the content and structure of the others – yielding a
mass-produced quality. Through sheer repetition images of chemical
plants become commonplace inuring the viewer to their potential hazards
and ultimately rendering them as culturally neutral, even inert,
objects. Thus, although kitsch might be viewed as the poor, uneducated
cousin of the sublime, it, like the sublime, has the power to subdue
the dangerous power of chemical plants for the viewer of such images.

Whether viewed through a sociocultural, art
historical, or aesthetic lens, chemical plant landscapes at once revere
and deflate the actualities of chemical industry. When viewed in the
context of architectural photography chemical plants literally and
metaphorically stand in for the castles and cathedrals of earlier
photographs, replacing these iconic symbols of power (monarchy and
church) with a later day equivalent – industry. Like architectural
images of castles and cathedrals, and unlike early depictions of
industry, current images of chemical industry decontextualize and
sanitize their presence in the larger landscape, visually minimizing
their potential for hazards. This dichotomy is recast by a reading of
these images within the framework of the sublime and kitsch. In this
aesthetic context, chemical plants become symbolic of the sublime power
of the human mind to both create and control chemical industry and its
products, while kitsch, when viewed as an overwrought visual extension
of the romantic sublime, diminishes their cultural power through
cliché
and reiteration.

4. Abstraction

4.1 Chemical plants: close-up view

An alternative but also common image of the
chemical
plant provides a close-up perspective of the tubes and towers discussed
as primary elements in the previous section. Even more than those of
the panoramic chemical plant, however, these cropped images
decontexualize the plants from their sociocultural implications –
formally obscuring their relationship to any past or present landscape,
industrial or otherwise. As shown in Figure 20 they are sometimes
photographed from above, but, more commonly from below, a ‘worms-eye’
perspective that can make the viewer of the photograph feel slightly
off-kilter and reverentially endows the plants with a beauty not found
in the chemical plant landscapes we have just discussed.[17]

With these changes in perspective also comes
an
alteration in the art historical associations of the images, albeit one
with a more positive valence. Thus, instead of being aligned with the
fakery of uroscopy or the kitschyness of the overwrought sublime
landscape, these images participate in the ‘high-art’ aesthetics of
early 20th-century modernism. In particular, the myriad of
ordered yet entangled tubes in these images recall the art of the
Machine Age, which exalted the rise of industrial culture as a symbol
of rationality and hope after World War I. A proto-Machine Art had
emerged in the years just prior to World War I when the epic-cubists,
futurists, and constructivists (Herbert 1997) embraced the machine as a
subject material for serious abstract art.[18] By
the 1920s a ‘machine aesthetic’ had developed that employed the
geometric forms of abstract art but was essentially representational.
Early in this time period the shift towards the representational is
perhaps best exemplified by Fernand Léger, whose paintings often
situated cartoonishly rendered people within backgrounds composed of
mechanized and industrial elements (Figure 21a). By the 1930’s many
Weimar artists had assumed a philosophy of Neue Sachlichkeit that was
reflected in a style of detached realism compared to the high
emotionality of classic German expressionism (Guenther 1995, pp.
35-36). Most notable among these for our purposes is Carl Grossberg who
painted colorful, often whimsical images of industrial sites including Kessel
in Einer Raffinerie and Der Gelbe Kessel (Figure 21b).[19] Ultimately the machine as the subject of art was
realized in the aesthetic of ‘machine purity’ by the precisionist
artist Charles Sheeler and others (Figure 21c). These American artists
revered the inherent beauty of machines rendering them in a pristine
fashion akin to those found in mechanical drawings. Although historians
of machine-age art often tend to focus on an artist’s fascination with
the mechanical aspects of the machines they portrayed, as shown in
Figure 21 the relationship of such art to chemical processes is just
as, if not more, important. These artists not only employed tubular
shapes as principle geometric forms in many of their compositions,
which implicitly links their work, and much of the abstract art of that
time, to the conduits and smokestacks associated with industrial
chemistry, they often explicitly represented chemistry. This is
clearly shown in Léger’s Le Mécanicien which
portrays a man
holding a cigarette backgrounded by a small industrial plant with a
smokestack which presumable indicates his status as a ‘mechanic’
(Figure 21a); Grossberg’s Der Gelbe Kessel where a chemical
tank is the primary subject of the painting (Figure 21b); and Sheeler’s
Ballet Mechanique which depicts a network of conduits
carrying
"compressed air and excess gases between the power house and the blast
furnaces" (Troyen 1987, p. 124) of Ford’s River Rouge Plant. As
demonstrated by these images there is a direct visual connection
between the work of the machine-age artists and the abstracted images
of chemical plants created by today’s commercial photographers (see
Figure 20).

The precisionists also rendered machines as
pristinely devoid of grime and human interaction. As machine purists
they, unlike the Dadaists of this same time period (who employed a
machine aesthetic as social critique), embraced an aesthetic of the
machine endowed with an optimism representative of the rise and promise
of American industry, including chemical industry (Lugon 2003). In
fact, for American precisionists in particular, the line between their
art and the utopian promise of American industry was porous, enabling
them to work as both fine artists and commercial artists without
hesitancy and to employ the same visual tropes in both artistic
spheres.[20] These visual tropes were eventually
subsumed by many commercial photographers and, as illustrated in Figure
20, are still employed today.

Like the work of the machine purists,
close-up
images of chemical plants appear representational but in fact rely
heavily on the formal canon of abstract art, including an emphasis on
primary geometric forms juxtaposed into complex arrays akin to the work
of the cubists. In theory, the geometric nature of these images
reflects the order and rationality of the machines they depict, but, as
Rutsky (1999, pp. 73-101) has argued, their relationship to abstract
modernism ultimately separates their technological function from their
form shifting them into a purely aesthetic realm. In their
close-cropped askew perspective these images, like Machine Age
photographs themselves, also reveal their connection to the abstract
movement of avant-garde photography made popular by the Bauhaus
photographer Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and others in the 1920s and 1930s who
"strove to separate objects from their natural settings" by employing
"disorienting viewpoints, radical cropping, strong figure-ground
relationships, [and] compositions oriented on the diagonal" (Light
1995, p. 97).

4.2 Glassware: the chemical still life

Like the close-up images of chemical plants,
many
contemporary images of chemical apparatus play on the abstract
tradition. Initially they appear simply representational, but closer
inspection shows that they are not. As in Figure 22 the prototypical
contemporary chemical ‘still life’ photograph is composed of a
collection of various flasks and test-tubes containing colored liquids
sitting on an indeterminate surface (i.e. not clearly a table or
lab bench) or, more often, shot from an odd angle and/or so closely
cropped that there is no recognizable surface. Their focus on
decontextualized glassware provides little clue to how the equipment is
manipulated by people in a laboratory environment. Instead, these
images are intended to represent the discipline of chemistry. In fact,
as we have shown in a previous paper, in popular visual culture images
of prototypical chemical glassware such as flasks and test-tubes are
emblematic icons of chemistry, and indeed of all of science (Schummer
& Spector 2007).

Unlike chemical plant abstractions, however,
the
formal aspects of many of these images have a strong allegiance to a
particularly spare mode of still life painting rather than to Machine
Age precisionism. This style, as exemplified by Giorgio Morandi in the
mid 20th century and later by William Bailey, express the
neoclassical ideal of beauty through their simplicity, balance, and
harmony (Figure 23a/b). Both of these painters worked within the still
life tradition through their choice of subject material (bottles,
plates, cups, and so forth sitting on tables) but at the same time
altered the tradition by stripping it down to its bare essentials,
leaving behind the elaborately crowded still lifes of earlier periods
that admit decay and death as a marker of time in the form of animal
carcasses, dying flowers, and insect infested fruit.[21]

Tony Cragg makes explicit this connection
between
images of chemical apparatuses and still lifes in his series Laboratory
Still Life No. 1-4 (Figure 23c). Like Morandi and Bailey he strips
the still life down to its bare essentials (in his case objects without
even a table), but unlike these artists he employs chemical flasks as
his subject material imparting a sense of irony into his still lifes.Like these artists’ still lifes, chemical ‘still lifes’ are
generally simple and well balanced compositions (see Figure 22). Unlike
Cragg’s paintings, however, chemical ‘still lifes’ extract
self-conscious irony through their institutional intentions. Instead,
like the chemicals and chemical industry that substitute for nature in
their manifestation of the sublime, an unintended irony emerges from
the tension between beauty and danger in the chemical ‘still lifes’.
Renaissance still lifes sometimes seductively depict idealized fruits
and vegetables, which on closer inspection actually show signs of
decomposition and insect infestation. Similarly chemical ‘still lifes’
work on two levels – those of the beautiful and the grotesque. Unlike
the explicit (and whimsical) grotesque aesthetic of Renaissance still
lifes, however, the association of chemical ‘still lifes’ with the
grotesque is expressed only implicitly through the negative
associations that chemicals often elicit from the public.[18]

Tony Cragg was schooled as a chemical
laboratory
technician and we can assume that he was exposed to illustrations of
chemical apparatuses in chemistry textbooks. It comes as no surprise,
therefore, that his work reveals an intimate conceptual parallel to the
long historical tradition of scientific textbook illustrations.
Nevertheless, although Cragg’s paintings are representational in so far
as they depict actual chemical glassware, they are also unmistakably
symbolic rather than didactic. Taken as scientific illustrations, his
paintings would provide no guidance for performing an actual
experiment. His images emblematize chemistry itself rather than
depicting its processes.

Such depictions of chemical glassware, both
in
contemporary photographs and fine art, assume their emblematic and
symbolic function through their historical lineage. From ancient
Alexandrian manuscripts to medieval alchemical treatises, images of
chemical apparatus were frequently interspersed with the text to
illustrate the specific shape or construction required for an
experiment (Obrist 2003). In Renaissance textbooks of distillation and
metallurgy, such illustrations sometimes consumed larger parts of the
volume, as in Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia (1540). During the 18th
century such drawings gained in popularity, culminating in
the
inclusion of numerous detailed illustrations of distillation apparatus
in one of the grand symbols of the Enlightenment, Diderot’s Dictionary
of Science, Arts, and Trades (Greenburg 2003, pp. 150-4) –
ostensibly providing information to the educated reader on instrumental
details. Starting with Lavoiser and continuing into the 19th century,
illustrations of apparatus became more accurate and gradually included
some drawings that attempted to depict dynamic chemical processes, in
alliance with the drive to legitimize and popularize chemistry
(Golinski 1992). Illustrations in chemical textbooks and manuals
sometimes showed apparatus with disembodied hands manipulating the
glassware, which in theory could be used as guides for performing an
actual experiment (Knight 2003). These drawings live on in chemistry
laboratory textbooks today and effectively communicate how to set up or
manually manipulate a particular piece of glassware (e.g.,
Williamson 2003).

Apart from their specific didactic purpose,
however, images of chemical apparatus assumed a life of their own in
the broader visual culture. Starting in the late 18th century,
they drew visual associations between chemistry, experiment, and
Lavoisien empiricism (Stafford 1996, pp. 91-110), even though, as
Beretta (2000) notes, the illustrations sometimes represented
anachronistic chemical apparatus. They helped chemistry to assume the
epistemological status of a respected science, to establish a
professional identity, and to popularize itself to a broader public. In
the late 19th century the iconography for representing
chemistry as a scientific discipline was fully developed, employing the
same elements we find today. These included static and decontextualized
drawings of flasks and test-tubes without any indication of how to use
them (Knight 1996). Like the subjects of the Machine Age, the depicted
apparatus became symbolically abstract and dissociated from its actual
function.

Today’s photographs of chemical glassware
have
largely replaced the woodcuts and etchings of earlier centuries, but
still operate on two semantic levels. On the one hand, like Cragg’s
still lifes, they retain the representational content and associations
of 19th-century chemistry. On the other, they symbolically
represent contemporary chemistry. Thus, images of glassware filled with
colored liquids are such potent indicators of chemistry that they are
used as the icons of science, although the chemistry they
represent is generally outmoded.[22] Moreover, once
abstracted from their representational meaning, the images could become
subject to graphical analysis and rearrangement both in photographic
self-representations of chemistry and in fine art. Indeed, we contend
that these images’ conservative, backward-looking, symbolism has
ironically led to their thoroughly modern rendition, allowing them to
be loosed from any representational context and brought into the realm
of pure aesthetics.

5. Conclusion

Like any other profession, chemists have been
involved in shaping their public image through the production and
dissemination of visual material that they believe best depicts their
profession. Because these images are often created by commercial
artists they are also consciously or, what appears more likely,
unconsciously embedded within specific cultural traditions and
conventions. Thus, unlike fine art representations of chemistry,[23] chemists and commercial artists presumably do not
seek originality (in a broad sense) but rather visual conventions that
create immediate associations between the image and chemistry. It can
be assumed that in these cases, chemists intend to show their science
in a positive light but at the same time need commercial artists to
produce images that ‘excite’ the eye. Therefore, within the highly
delineated subject material and conventions that these images demand,
they seek to create interesting and original images. Although perhaps
less overtly articulated than their formalist qualities, these images
also expose conceptual and psychosocial aspects of the chemistry they
seek to represent. Visual images of chemistry are situated and
perceived within the larger cultural context of chemistry – a science
with a dual (some would say split) personality, at once academic and
industry-serving, conceptual and applied – so that they express the
multiple layers of the science itself. As a result they provide
insights into how chemistry seeks to aesthetisize its representation in
the larger culture while simultaneously exposing how the larger culture
comes to understand chemistry through its visual representation.

A qualitative examination of the visual
self-representation of chemistry reveals that three specific motifs
prevail so strongly that they have assumed a stereotypical character:
the image of a scientist holding up a piece of glassware and gazing at
its contents as the key pose of chemical portraiture, chemical
landscapes of smokestacks and conduits in atmospherically illuminated
skies, and chemical still lifes of various flasks filled with colored
liquids. In this paper we have examined these motifs within the broader
cultural-historical context. Not surprisingly, all three ‘chemical’
motifs can be traced back to longer traditions of the fine arts and
popular visual culture, which have shaped both the visual conventions
and the cultural meanings of today’s chemical stereotypes. It turns out
that, like the split identity of chemistry itself, these images
represent a conflicted public identity for the discipline. All too
often, as the chemical portraiture section of this paper demonstrates,
commercial artists, who are likely not apprised of the artistic
tradition in which they work, and the chemists who naïvely
disseminate
their self-representations, unintentionally promulgate an image of
chemistry based in a satirically debasing tradition. Or, as in the case
of chemical landscapes, these images dabble in a tradition that begins
in the high art conventions of the sublime landscape but, like those
conventions, has the potential to cross the line into the naïve
and
unironic aesthetics of kitsch. On the other hand, as is evident in the
section on abstraction where we analyzed the chemical still life,
chemistry and its apparatus can inspire commercial artists to reach
outside of the representational into artistic traditions that have
commanded respect throughout the 20th century.

Notes

[1] Although chemists
are
photographed and sketched in some other poses, that pose is by far the
most dominating public image of chemistry on the Internet and in
cliparts according to our previous work (Schummer & Spector 2007).

[2] Pulse feeling was
not the
same as pulse taking in today’s meaning, as long as transportable
clocks were unavailable. Instead it consisted of feeling the pressure
and rhythm of the pulse.

[3] According to
Zglinicki
(1982, pp. 23-24), the oldest known uroscopy image is in the
12th-century manuscript Regulae urinarum by Maurus and Urso of
Salerno.

[4] Relief variations of
the
motif soon appeared on other public places, like the Notre-Dame
cathedrals in both Rouen (Zglinicki 1982, p. 133) and Paris
(http://education.umn.edu/EdPA/iconics/wander/tour7la.htm, Figure
1-023).

[5] Connor 2001,
referring to
Garrison 1917, pp. 165-6.

[6] For a collection of
examples, see Zglinicki 1982, pp. 135-146.

[7] On uroscopy in the
Dance-of-the-Death tradition, see Zglinicki 1982, pp. 77-96.

[8] For a review, see
Wilcox
& Whitham 2003; on the related Caduceus symbol (two snake twisted
around a rod), which was occasionally used by pharmacists, see
Friedlander 1992.

[10] Teniers knew this
painting at least since 1651 when it became part of the collection in
Brussels that he supervised (Klinge & Lüdke 2005, p. 278).

[11] Useful internet
image
sources include the Science & Society Picture Library and the
Ingenious database at the Science Museum London
<http://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk>
<http://www.ingenious.org.uk/>, the Smith Collection at the
University of Pennsylvania
<http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/smith/>, the Wellcome
Library <http://medphoto.wellcome.ac.uk>, Wikipedia Commons
<http://commons.wikimedia.org>, and Google Images
<http://images.google. com>.

[12] For a
documentation of
industry in art, see the exhibition catalogue Beneke & Ottomeier
2002 as well as Frese 2000 and Türk 1997; for early industrial
landscape paintings in England, see Klingender 1968, Wagner 1979, and
Briggs 1979.

[15] The following
qualitative analyses are based large sets of images that we retrieved
from the internet for a quantitative study of the self-image of science
(Schummer & Spector 2007).

[16] See the American
Chemical Society National Benchmark Survey, July 2000 for a summary of
the public’s attitudes towards chemistry, chemicals, and chemists.

[17] In the
introduction to High
Techne Rutsky writes that "The aesthetic impulse in modernism
continually returns to romantic notions of the aesthetic – or of
beauty, at least – as an eternal or spiritual realm, unchanging and
whole […] To this end, it often connects the spiritual and the
technological, attempting to impart a sense of wholeness and the
eternal to technological forms" (Rutsky 1999, p. 9).

[19] Although
recognized as
an Neue Sachlichkeit artist Grossberg's images of industrial plants
have also been considered to be aligned with surrealism and magical
realism (see Hughes 2004, pp. 123-125 and Guenther 1995, pp. 46-48.

[20] Sheeler, in
particular,
made this connection between his art and American industry explicit
with his commissioned paintings of the Ford Motor Company.

[21] For example see
Renaissance and Baroque period still lifes in Ebert-Schifferer 1999,
pp. 115-223.

[22] Of course chemists
still
use flasks (and sometimes even test-tubes), but like all sciences at
this point in the history, chemistry would presumably be much more
accurately represented by complex instrumentation.